The Rager Review: Mr. Robot Season 2 Premiere "eps2.0_unm4sk-1(2).tc"

*If spoilers are a thing you care about, go finish watching season 1 before reading this, ya dumb-dumbs*

There was two challenges that I faced when I sat down and watched the two part season premiere of Mr. Robot last night: there were so many loose ends left from season one that it was difficult to keep straight what was what and that was partly due to the second challenge. After it was established that Mr. Robot was existing only in Elliot's imagination, it left me trying to figure out if any of the new characters Elliot was interacting with (like his friend that he eats every meal with and Craig Robinson's character) are also figments of his imagination. It's like the most recent season of Game of Thrones (yeah, I'm spoiling that too) when time travel was revealed to now be in play, the possibilities were endless as far as fan theories grew rampant. Now that season one established the degradation of Elliot's mental stability in the form of hallucinations and multiple personalities, anything is possible. Season one ended without saying as much but it was safe for everyone to assume that Elliot had killed Tyrell considering the last thing Elliot remembered was reaching for the gun in the popcorn machine but that was blown to bits at the end of the 2nd part when the voice of Tyrell comes from the telephone at the end. However, one can argue that could be a hallucination because Elliot seemed to be in that state for the majority of the episode. And that's an interesting thing to discuss, at the end of the season 1 finale, Elliot was trying his best to rid himself of Mr. Robot's influence as well as the hallucination of his mother and his childhood self. Follow that up with the season 2 premiere and we find Elliot completely unplugged from technology in attempt to weaken the voice and influence of his Mr. Robot persona but still relying on the hallucination of his mother to adhere to his new strict schedule because Elliot has no interest in recovering from his psychosis but is more concerned with ridding himself of Mr. Robot.

Another interesting plotline to potentially see this season is Joanna continuing the downward spiral into completely buying into the "evil" in E-Corp as she grows colder (something we saw the beginnings of while trying on shoes in the season 1 finale) and ultimately decides to give up on the lawsuit against E-Corp on behalf of her father, which was the only reason she got the job at E-Corp in the first place. 

And finally, Darlene is now leading fsociety while Elliot/Mr. Robot is off in their experimental short film, which is completely fine because now the focus is on getting their message across now that Elliot destroyed the economy last season. Essentially, the tech aspect is complete and now comes the PR aspect, which she pulls off quite clearly with the E-Corp CTO being blackmailed into burning almost $6 million in front of a park full of people.

The formula of season premieres is simple and effective, play your greatest hits as far as established character interactions, shake the cobwebs from the minds of the audience and give them time to slowly remember plot points from the previous season and once we're all on the same page, introduce something new that will really light the season ablaze in the next episode. The ambitiousness of Mr. Robot skips over all of that and immediately drops the audience in the thick of it with no recap, no character being burdened but the task of being Captain Expository, just straight back into the chaos of Elliot's psychosis. It's a bold idea considering Mr. Robot hit it's peak popularity at the end of season 1 and afterward when the show began winning awards, leading to presumably a flock of new eyes on this episode in-particular that may have never seen the show and didn't bother binge-watching the previous season. This sets a noble precedent by the creators of the show basically saying "Get in early or catch up because this train slows for no one." There is one thing in the "season premiere" formula that still rang true for Mr. Robot: I'm curious as hell to see what will happen next.